


One To Make Your Heart Remember Me

by oneshinyapple



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: ASM #800 spoilers, Canonical Character Deaths (mentioned), First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Timeline What Timeline, it's all AU anywho, very selective canon compliance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 20:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14901521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneshinyapple/pseuds/oneshinyapple
Summary: It’s an old dance, one they’ve been doing for half their lives. They’re good at it. But every so often, one of them falls out of step.





	One To Make Your Heart Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> Super spoilers for Amazing Spider-Man #800 and references to Spider-Man/Human Torch #2. Otherwise ignores a lot of other things. Guess we'll just call this AU. But then, isn't everything?
> 
> In all its unbetaed glory.

_i_

Peter feels the arm slip gently around his waist and knows who it belongs to without even looking. More than the weight, it’s the warmth of it, and he allows himself a small sad smile.  
  
The cemetery is still and empty and Flash’s grave, only two days old, has yet to grow any grass on the fresh dirt over it.  
  
“How did you know where to find me?”  
  
Johnny bumps against him gently, shoulder to shoulder. “Because I know you.”  
  
Peter nods. Of course.  
  
“And I told you I’d be checking in. And when you weren’t home and wouldn’t answer my calls—“  
  
“I’m alright, Johnny.”  
  
To his credit, Johnny chooses not to call him out on the blatant lie.  
  
“Pete— Is there anything I can do?” he asks, and Peter feels his breath on his cheek. Johnny sounds strangely helpless, as if he knows there isn’t anything, but is willing to try all the same.  
  
Peter shakes his head, feeling his temple brush against the side of Johnny’s face, before leaning his head on Johnny’s shoulder. “This is enough,” he says.  
  
The hand leaves Peter’s waist and moves to the back of his head, but Johnny doesn’t say anything, for which Peter is thankful. It’s difficult not to think about how close he came to having to mourn over more than one grave. Instead, Aunt May, Mary Jane, Cindy, Miles, and Harry are all fine, thanks to Flash’s sacrifice. And Johnny—Norman hadn’t even given him much thought, but he’d still been in danger despite that fact.  
  
Peter turns his head and buries his face in Johnny’s neck, feeling Johnny’s fingers in his hair. “I’m alright,” he says again, for no apparent reason, except maybe to convince himself.  


 

 _ii_  
  
Peter scratches the window outside Johnny’s apartment and immediately wishes he hasn’t. What if Johnny isn’t alone tonight? What if he’s out having fun? What if—  
  
The window slides up, and Johnny squints at his moonlit silhouette. “Nngh?”  
  
“Nice to see you’re as eloquent as always, Torch.”  
  
“Pete, it’s, like, two in the morning.”  
  
“More like three. Can I come in?”  
  
Johnny steps aside, yawning as he further musses his sleep-tousled hair.  
  
Peter takes off his mask as Johnny climbs right back into bed, lying on his side with his eyes half-closed.  
  
“Did something happen?”  
  
Peter shakes his head, standing uncertainly by the bed. “Super quiet tonight for some reason. Only ran into one mugging.”  
  
“What’s the world coming to?” Johnny murmurs after another jaw-cracking yawn. “How about Spider-Man calling it a night, then?”  
  
Peter hesitates.  
  
It’s an old dance, one they’ve been doing for half their lives. They’re good at it. But every so often, one of them falls out of step. Peter’s been out of step for quite some time.  
  
Johnny’s hand suddenly reaches out, finds his wrist and yanks him down.  
  
”Close your eyes and be quiet,” Johnny mutters, pushing a pillow at him. “I’m not missing out on my beauty sleep because you’re feeling restless.”  
  
“Fine. But only because you look like you really need it.”  
  
Johnny tries to smother him with another pillow and Peter laughs, finding the rhythm again, moving smoothly back to a familiar place.  
  
And if Johnny instinctively wraps an arm around him and pulls him close in his sleep, it doesn’t mean anything more than it always has.

 

 _iii_  
  
When Johnny wakes up at the slightly more reasonable hour of 9 o’clock, the sun is up and Peter is gone. It’s not unexpected. For someone whose power set includes sticking around, Peter Parker is a master at slipping away.  
  
Johnny reclaims his pillow and buries his face in it. It’s the only thing to assure him that last night had been real because he can smell Peter’s shampoo or whatever junk he puts in his hair on it.  
  
He starts drifting off again, lulled by a weird sense of contentment he hasn’t felt in months, until his Avengers card starts beeping and he has to drag himself to work.

 

 _iv_  
  
Johnny is away for longer than he would have liked, the entire time wishing he could just go—  
  
Home? No, that place doesn’t exist anymore. Peter’s lost the Baxter Building, along with everything else.  
  
He returns to his apartment in the end — because where else does he belong now — and is surprised to find it not empty.  
  
“You really should close the window, Flamebrain. It’s a nice neighborhood, but still.”  
  
He blinks at Peter sitting in his living room, in Spider-Man gear with his mask in hand.  
  
“Yeah, yeah. Keeping it closed would definitely keep bugs out of my place, too. Guess I should have remembered that.” He looks at his best friend quizzically. “What’s up?”  
  
“I was gonna ask if you wanted to go out on patrol with me,” he says, ignoring the bug bait and toying with his mask. “But you look like a planet just rolled over you, so I guess I’ll just—“  
  
“I don’t wanna go on patrol—“  
  
“Yeah, I figured—“  
  
“But we could go get dinner. I’m starving.”  


 

 _v_  
  
“Hey, you ever think about that time back at The Coffee Bean?” Peter asks after they were settled in the cleanest-looking diner they could find nearby, plucking the fourth french fry Johnny has chucked at him out of the air and eating it. Peter is back in his civvies, looking good in that scruffy nerd way that is both comforting in its familiarity and heart-rending.  
  
Johnny blinks. “You mean the time you got pissed because I was insulting you and we ended up switching places for a day?”  
  
“Yeah...” Peter says, pulling Johnny’s plate away before he could launch more fries at him.  
  
“I have never seen Reed so furious but also so impressed because he said your webbing was a real breakthrough in poly-whats-it science.”  
  
“Polymer,” Peter supplies absently. “It was a good time,” he adds, looking out the window, but the tone of his voice makes Johnny think he’s referring to something else.  
  
Johnny straightens. “Gwen was there.”  
  
“And Gwen’s Dad...and Flash.” A forced smile. “And MJ didn’t hate me and Harry’d never tried to kill me.”  
  
“Crystal was there, too,” Johnny remembers.  
  
“And now it’s just—“  
  
“You and me,” Johnny finishes bluntly. “That not enough?”  
  
Peter’s eyes widen as he looks at Johnny. “No. No, that’s not what I mean at all—“  
  
“I know what you meant, Pete. I mean, look at me. I used to be in the Fantastic Four. This whole extended family with all these crazy kids. And now it’s just me and Ben.” And you, he almost says. But he shuts his mouth and just pulls his plate back in front of him.  
  
For the next few minutes, Johnny pretends all he wants to do is stuff his face full of burger and fries, strongly aware that Peter’s stopped eating and is just watching him.  
  
“Johnny.”  
  
Peter hasn’t used his name in any of their recent conversations, and there’s definitely something strange in his tone. Johnny drops his fries and looks up.  
  
“Promise me you’re not going anywhere.”  
  
It’s an impossible promise and Peter knows it. It’s a promise Peter himself can’t even make. But then Johnny thinks about how they’ve both died and come back, been lost and then found, erased and rewritten, over and over again and still, they’re both here, having mediocre burgers and fries while something heavy sits across their shoulders, speaking words that aren’t quite what they want to say.  
  
“I promise I’ll always try to come back,” is the best he can do.  
  
Peter nods jerkily and doesn’t say anything else.

 

 _v_  
  
Peter grabs Johnny’s head between his hands and kisses him on the sidewalk outside the diner and Johnny isn’t even surprised, not really. He’s been waiting for something like this for a long time. Or more like wishing, really. When it finally happens, it’s like the first breath after an eternity under water, Johnny’s greedy lungs desperate to get their fill. Which is funny because Peter’s kissing the air right out of him right now.  
  
When he pulls away, Johnny’s afraid of drowning again, but Peter’s eyes are strangely soft, and he clings to that look like a life raft.  
  
“You really couldn’t wait to do that until we got back to my place?” Johnny whines, longing for more contact and not caring that they’re attracting attention.  
  
“I wasn’t sure I was gonna get an invite.”  
  
“I don’t know why I’m friends with an idiot like you.” He steps back, pulls Peter’s hands away from his face, and blazes into flames. “Don’t make me wait too long, Parker,” he says through his uncertainty. _Here’s your way out, Peter, just in case. And if you don’t want it—at least we’d get to my apartment in record time._

 

 _vi_  
  
Peter swings across rooftops and between buildings in as straight a line as possible from the alley he’d changed in to Johnny’s apartment. He knows Johnny has just given him a way out. That Johnny’s willing to pretend he hasn’t done something stupid like kiss his best friend in front of an entire street.  
  
There’s a knot in the pit of his stomach that feels like guilt, grief and fear, and he knows that it’s what’s pushing him along, at least in part. But mostly it’s just the fact that he’s been lying to so many of his friends for half his life, and he’s too tired to keep it up anymore and too afraid he’d never get the chance to tell them the truth.  
  
Maybe it was time to let at least his second oldest lie go.  
  
Johnny’s window is open and he glides in like a whisper, landing on his feet without a sound, right in front of Johnny. Johnny, who didn’t look surprised when Peter kissed him, looks surprised now.  
  
Johnny stammers, body heat rising, “I thought—I thought—“  
  
“That Peter Parker, all-around failure, would flake as he always does?” he asks, just a touch nervous and loud.  
  
Johnny’s expression softens as he tugs Peter’s mask off. “You’re not a failure, but yeah. Something like that.”  
  
“I almost did.”  
  
“This bout of honesty is really refreshing, Webhead. I’d worry that the world is ending except that already almost happened this morning.”  
  
“Shut up, Johnny.”  
  
Johnny smirks just a little before closing the gap and kissing him. And it feels a little like falling, like that moment when he lets go of a webline before the next one catches on a wall. A leap of nothing less than faith.  
  
They stumble into bed, unwilling to let go, except to laugh when Peter bangs his knee on the post, when Johnny’s arms get tangled in his jacket, and when their heads knock painfully together in blind enthusiasm.  
  
It’s an old dance, one they’ve been doing for half their lives. They’re good at it. Every so often, they fall out of step. But maybe it’s not so much because they’ve lost the rhythm. Maybe it just means they’ve found a new a song.

**Author's Note:**

> I was supposed to write a light-hearted buddy comedy goddammit. I don't know why this happened. Shot straight out of the id, I guess.


End file.
